MFGG was a huge part of my childhood and my early teenage years, and before I even had Game Maker I'd assemble level layouts out of spritesheets and print out recolors of enemy sprites done in MS Paint.
After I joined the forums (around 2009, but I lurked for years) it was a huge part of my daily routine, I came home from school and hopped onto MFGG every night. It was something I looked forward to all day, and I vividly remember the split and the discourse and sense of unbelonging that kinda followed onto Minus World in the wake of it happening.

I'm posting this through the STUNGUN account tho, and we're not one person, we're a team, so I'm speaking for my own experiences. But three of us were MFGGers in the past, and that's where we met in the first place.

This is an absolutely amazing writeup, thank you so much for posting it.

This is a wonderful piece of writing - while I never knew this specific community, it really captures the feeling of a certain age of the internet, and what it was like on those kind of small forums. It reminds me of reading the fanlore wiki, but less dry, and closer to my own experiences.

I'm not sure the decline of the site can really be solely blamed on any individual moderation policy or bad decision - it could hardly have escaped the influence of the broader environment. Small forums seem to have had their day, but maybe a few years down the line we'll get similar nostalgic recollection about people's tiny discords... only much harder to archive and look back on.

Good words, made me nostalgic of the old era of MFGG. I agree that it was the weird randomness that resulted in the most creativity.